Let's discuss how churches can communicate well using websites, social media, and other tools.
Tim
Vibrant
Church
Staci
Keith
In a world in which we have endless ways to communicate, people are disconnected from each other. The internet provides an opportunity to reconnect with other believers.
Choosing a domain name is an important choice for a church's online presence. Following are guidelines and unspoken conventions for choosing a domain name for a church.
More and more churches have realized the benefits of sharing their sermons online. Here are some basic steps to know what and how to podcast.
Does your church not currently have a website? Is it unmaintained or out-of-date? Any church website should at least have the following basic information.
What does having a simple church website involve? Read the below list of principles to help keep your website simple. Give visitors a reason to stay, not to leave!
Here are a few tips (focusing mainly on PDFs) to keep in mind as your church disseminates information via email, your church website or any other electronic means.
Twitter experienced a boom last year. A big boom. It started 2009 with well under 10 million unique visits a month, and ended with over 60 million. It's an understatement to say that more and more people are starting to use Twitter.
The privacy concerns that accompanied the announcement of Google Buzz illustrate the importance of scrutinizing every option, feature, and aspect with a rollout on your website. Even though your church won't announce anything that will be as widely used or talked about as Google Buzz, there is a lesson to be learned.
Remember when websites used to have flash intros (frequently made in Adobe Flash)? Personally, I am glad when websites don't, and get straight to content. What about other websites that are purely flash like most restaurant or band websites? Flash enables a website to have rich dynamic content, however it also has several drawbacks.
I recently registered for my first sprint triathlon, the Hawk Island Triathalon. While visiting their site I was surprised to see how they displayed images. It is a colorful, informative, and photo-filled site however I would like to point out one no-no.
Over the last couple of years it seems just about everyone is either a social media consultant or offering seminars. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, I wanted to pass along one that I have heard good things about. This next Friday WiredChurches.com is offering a one day workshop on Social Media & Web. The workshop will focus providing valuable content on your site, the best way to present it, and how to use social media for marketing. If you check out their site, look at the other events they offer and you might just come across another one that interests you.
Ever wonder what operating system other churches are running on their servers? What they use for email? What solution other churches use for their staff intranet? What their IT budget is? The Church IT Survey is a survey that provides responses for these questions and forty others from over 150 churches.
Endless solutions exists to make your church run better, faster, and more efficient. As with any solution, there's a trade off between using a new technology since it's faster or cheaper, and the usefulness of it. Dan Hotchkiss explores the difficulties associated with new technologies and the shift to digital in an article from The Alban Institute, titled When to Adopt New Technology
It's Christmas time, which means its time for family, food, presents, lights, trees, and a chance to reflect on how one birth changed the world forever. However, it also means seeing Christmas Decorations in stores as early as August. It seems that there is no end to what you can buy that is Christmas themed.
Have you considered providing video of your services? What about live streaming video? New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, this last June, started streaming their services live to iPhone and iPod Touch users.
Part of living in community is sharing needs, and abilities. As part of a church community, you probably share these needs and abilities through bulletin announcements, or someone tracking and matching up people to help. While this can be effective for some churches, it can limit the potential of helping each other by limiting it to only dire needs.
This last week Jimmy Wales spoke at Calvin College’s January series. Even though I was not able to make it the campus to see him speak, I did watch it live from the Ladies Literary Club in downtown Grand Rapids. Wales is the founder Wikipedia and...
Two aspects of the web that are driving innovation are collaboration and lowering costs, of which almost any new web service or site provides. Recently Microsoft started the
Technical Preview of Microsoft Office Web Apps
which includes both of these. Office Web Apps (OWA) enable the editing, sharing, and storing of Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote files online, through most browsers and any operating system.
Not only is there a sample bulletin announcement and other ideas on this page to spread the word about The Network, but there are two images that you can post on your church website. This not only showcases your support of The Network, but helps us get the word out so that we can add to the number of voices on the site and share the knowledge and wisdom for the many different roles in a church.
Recently I had an interesting experience on Twitter. While it's not revolutionary, it is simple and effective at finding people in your area that have similar interests, are looking for a new church, or just searching.
A couple of weeks ago I read an article on the NY Times blog section of their website written by one of their columnists. I was shocked to find the post rife with spelling mistakes. Not only was this distracting, but immediately led me to question the writer’s credibility.
Yesterday, Mozilla released an incremental upgrade to it's popular browser Firefox 3.6. Even though this is a small upgrade there are numerous changes, which they detail in their blog post. First, it's over 20 percent faster than the previous upgrade. Second, it includes better support for plug ins with a plugin updater. Firefox 3.6 has...
Look up; at the top of the window. Up in the address bar is the URL of this website. Have you looked at the addresses that your website is using? Your church is probably using a system (CMS) that automatically creates the URL for a page based on a template. Usually the default is for ugly unusable URLs. However, with most of the popular CMSs there are options to change the way URLs are structured.
Over two decades ago Nike coined the phrase "Just do it". While this has taken on numerous meanings, the original meaning still rings true: even if it's not going to be perfect or close to perfect, just do it anyways. If you are waiting for the perfect moment and for everything to come together perfectly, it's probably not going to. Instead, take the first small steps, and go from there.
Another simple and quick way to add value to your church is to have email addresses at the church’s domain. Many times church staff or leaders create email accounts with the provider of their internet service, or through free providers like Yahoo (Yahoo email), Google (Gmail), or Microsoft (Live Mail, Hotmail).